Introducing Flat Arthur, aka His Grace the Duke of Wellington
Several weeks ago, fellow Historical Novel Society member Cora Lee shared an idea that she’d been having fun with for a few months and asked if any of us would like to play along. She took the idea of “Flat Stanley” and gave it a historical twist, creating “Flat Arthur”– a two dimensional version of the multi-dimensional Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1842).*
Would I like to play along? Oh yeah! Over the next few months, Flat Arthur will travel with me hither and you. (Mostly to one library or another. Sorry, your Grace.) You can follow his travels and travails on my Tumblr site.
You doubtless know Wellesley as the general who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, the feat for which he was created the 1st Duke of Wellington. Here are a few bits about Wellington that you may not know:
- He gave his name to knee-high rubber boots.** He probably did not inspire Beef Wellington
- He earned the nickname the “Iron Duke” during his first term as Prime Minister (1828-1830), thanks to his opposition to parliamentary reform. His position was so unpopular that he installed iron shutters on the windows of his home in London to keep angry crowds from smashing them.***
- Wellesley enjoyed his first military successes in India through a combination of talent and nepotism. He fought at the Battle of Seringapatam against Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Mysore War. His older brother, Richard Wellesley, who was Governor-General of India, promoted him from colonel to major-general and named him Governor of Seringapatam and Mysore, honors that caused friction with senior officers who were by-passed in his favor. Major-General Wellesley retroactively earned his promotion with a stunning victory at Assaye in the Second Maratha War.
Stay tuned for more Wellington tidbits and Flat Arthur sightings.
* Here’s the blog post in which she introduced the idea for those of you who aren’t familiar with the original “Flat Stanley”.
**He could have given his name to something much less dignified than boots. The emperor Vespasian introduced public lavatories to Rome, where they are still known as vespasianos.
***The comparison with Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady, is irresistible. She embraced the nickname after it appeared in the headline of a piece in the Soviet newspaper Red Star, three years before she became Prime Minister. You can’t blame her: her previous political nickname was “Thatcher the Milk Snatcher,” earned when she cut free milk for schoolchildren from the budget during her tenure as Minister of Education. But I digress.
Dear Abigail
A million years ago, when I had first finished my doctoral dissertation and was tiptoeing toward writing about history for an non-academic audience, I headed off to a week-long writing class in Iowa. Along with the rest of my gear, I packed David McCullough’s then newly released John Adams, on the assumption that it would keep me interested during the down moments but wouldn’t distract me from the task at hand. Wrong. It kept me turning the pages like the most thrilling of thrillers.
Adams was fascinating, but the person who really caught my imagination was Abigail. I suspect I’m not the only one who felt that way. If you, too, are an Abigail fan, here’s your chance to learn more:
In Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Remarkable Sisters, Diane Jacobs returns to the topic of smart women in revolutionary times that she previously explored in her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Readers are familiar with Abigail Adams thanks to her sharp-witted and loving correspondence with her husband. But John Adams wasn’t the only person who benefited from Abigail’s pen. In Dear Abigail, Jacobs uses the correspondence of Abigail and her sisters to build a picture of what it was like to watch the American Revolution from the sidelines.
Mary, Abigail, and Betsy Smith were the daughters of a wealthy and influential Massachusetts minister. They were highly educated, well read, and opinionated–and married men who valued those qualities. In their letters they complain about gender inequalities and household problems. They discuss the intellectual issues of the time from the theological questions of the Great Awakening to the philosophical underpinnings of revolution. They arrange to be inoculated for smallpox–a controversial issue at the time. They share news about the war. They worry about their parents, their husbands, and their children.
Much of the book deals with the day-to-day difficulties of the war. Of the three, Abigail suffered the most. (Some of the most poignant passages of the book show her struggling alone with a difficult pregnancy and ultimate stillbirth.) But all of them deal with shortages, lack of information, and fear.
Dear Abigail is the perfect pendant to McCullough’s John Adams: the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of three of its Founding Mothers.
Much of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Re-Run: Cowboys and Indians, North African Style
Unlikely though it seems, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the French Foreign Legion over the last week.
I bet most of you have a few stock images of the Foreign Legion in your heads: men fleeing from their past into the desert and anonymity, absinthe, burning sands and blazing sun, those funny little billed caps with the flap down the back. (Extra points for anyone who knows what those caps are called.)
For most of us, those images come from trashy novels and B-movies that are kissing cousins to the American western at its least thoughtful. Both genres are heavy on the cavalry*, noble (or savage) armed horsemen as opponents, last chance saloons, and strong, silent heroes. Not to mention burning sands and blazing sun (see above).
And just like in the American western, the dangerous armed horseman on the ridge has his own version of the story.
Abd al-Qadir by Rudolf Ernst
If the French hadn’t invaded Algeria in 1830**, Algerian emir Abd al-Qadir would probably have been content to follow his grandfather and father as the spiritual leader of the Qadiriyah Sufi order. In the fall of 1832, when the French began to expand their control into the Algerian interior, the Arab tribes of Oran elected al-Qadir as both the head of the Qadiriyah order and as their military leader.
Al-Qadir led Arab resistance against French expansion in North Africa from 1832 to 1847. He was so successful that at one point two-thirds of Algeria recognized him as its ruler. The French signed treaties with al-Qadir and broke them. (Similarities to the American western, anyone?) After a crushing defeat in 1843, he was hunted across North Africa as an outlaw.
Abd al-Qadir surrendered at the end of 1847 and was imprisoned in France until 1853. Following his release, he settled in Damascus, where he entered the stage of world history one last time. In 1860, the Muslims of Damascus rose and began slaughtering the city’s Christians. When the Turkish authorities did nothing to stop the massacre, Abd al-Qadir and 300 followers rescued over 12,0000 Christians from the massacre. Once hunted by the French as a dangerous outlaw, Abd al-Qadir received the Legion of Honor from Napoleon III for his efforts.
Heroism is in the eye of the beholder.
*In fact, the Foreign Legion was an infantry unit. Just saying.
** Over what the French press called the Incident of the Flyswatter. I couldn’t make this stuff up.